Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (45 page)

I grew up around Christians who believed in a seven day creation, preached the r
eality of Hell and Judgement, and railed against the lie that was evolution. They were also, for the most part, racists and homophobes… And the only difference between them and me was that I had a father who shoved a science fiction paperback into my pre-teen hands and ordered me to read it. After all, it’s pretty hard to be prejudiced against blacks and gays when you’re a-okay with Klingons and the Green Men of Mars.

Lou Anders

So the 21st of May, 2011, came and went without a whiff of the Rapture, nary a hint of Moby Douche, the Great White Fail, breaching the firmament above. No star called Wormwood fallen from the sky, turning a third of the waters to tasty absinthe. No a
ngels treading the wine gums of the wrath of the Lord. Not a peep of New Jerusalem on the early warning radar. Instead, the next day came in New Sodom, with Benny the Rat still in the Vatican, Fred Phelps still on the streets, and Harold Camping still on the radio, still selling his shtick. The Rapture was postponed apparently, till the 21st October.

And did it come then?

I was too busy having one fuck of a fortieth birthday party to notice.

Yes, I’m cynical. Deal with it. Dawkins, Hitchens and Pullman are a little po-faced in their harrumphery for my liking, but colour me sceptical and run me up the “oh really?” flagpole, because when it comes to religion, you can keep your gestalt schizophrenia; I am not innarested in your condition. It’s that whole Enlightenment thing; I favour a worldview that’s less inclined to burn me at the fucking stake. It’s not a problem with religion per se, you u
nderstand, just bugfuck nutjobbery in general. The rapture of unreason.

I came to New Sodom from a small town in Central Scotland, see, a queer kid in exile from a childhood I can’t help glimpsing in the picture Lou Anders paints of his own upbringing—albeit backwards in a different way, a New Town housing scheme, built in the 1970s to take Glasgow’s overspill, to punt the plebs out to the suburbs, greener pa
stures, bluer skies and flowers. The razor-gang culture of Glasgow’s inner city, the small town mentality of an Ayrshire village, crossbred to perfection with anti-Catholic bigotry in place of racism, it was
swellegant!

There wasn’t a whole lot of creationist evangelism, but racists and hom
ophobes? My formative years were the era of the National Front, Nazi punk bands like Skrewdriver, the “Gay Plague” of AIDS, Clause 28. Good old Clause 28, outlawing the “promotion of homosexuality” in the public sector. I proposed it as a topic for our school debating society, I recall, but the teacher had to sadly veto it. A debate on Clause 28 might be construed as “promoting homosexuality,” you see; to allow pupils to argue Clause 28 could be a breach of Clause 28, a sacking offence.

(That’s some clause, that Clause 28, thought this homo Yossarian.)

Point is, religion wasn’t the driving force, but the reactionary bollocks sprang from the same source, the abrogation of ethical judgement to received moral wisdom, the bugfuck nutjobbery of the righteous. All prejudice presents itself as piety, propriety. And if today I proudly wear the title “THE…. Sodomite Hal Duncan!!” gifted to me by homophobic hatemail, I don’t know that it’s just being a bugger that makes me bolshie. It’s not just the background of bigotry as resonates with me in that opening quote from Anders. A geek and a gawk in specs, with elbow patches on my blazer, I was a teenage Spock even before sexuality kicked in, booted me out of any dream of normativity, into the evermade estranged reality of the queer.

I could almost imagine, then, that it wasn’t the day my teacher vetoed that Clause 28 debate that set me on the path to New Sodom, a blue flower pinned in my lapel, but rather the moment a mate shoved a copy of Asimov’s
I, Robot
into my hand. I could almost imagine it was the logic of the Three Laws, reason and the scientific worldview, that set me against the bugfuck nutjobbery, the hysteria and hate, the rapture of unreason. I could almost imagine it was the experience of alterity accepted in Klingons and Green Men of Mars that served as antidote to the conditioning of my culture.

Almost.

The Forgotten Sibling of Comedy and Tragedy

You have literally as many forms as Proteus; and now you go all manner of ways, twisting and turning, and, like Proteus, become all manner of people at once, and at last slip away from me in the disguise of a general, in order that you may escape exhibiting your Homeric lore.

Plato,
Ion

If this substitution of
strange fiction
and
the quirk
solves the problem of overload by abandoning the open definition of
fantasy
and
the fantastic
, does this mean that those terms are now free to be applied solely in the context of a closed definition? Might we now focus in on one particular type of strange fiction which utilises its alethic quirks in a specific way, calling this and only this fantasy? It is a temptation. We might now simply accept, as subsets of these strange fictions, a pair of narrative grammars driven by the numina on one hand, the monstrum on the other, the marvellous here, the monstrous there, setting
fantasy
up in partnership with
horror
.

But there is, I think, another identifiable discourse of narratives that might legitimately compete for a label of
fantasy
(as one can label works of Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Miller
tragedy
, as one can label works of Aristophanes, Shakespeare and Orton
comedy
), a mode of narrative that exploits the sort of quirks we think of as the fantastic, which is to say, the alethic, the incredible (as tragedy exploits the abject, as comedy exploits the absurd), but which walks the line between Clute’s Thinning and Thickening, between the marvellous and the monstrous.

If I would argue against some of the narrowly focused views of what fantasy does (e.g. Clute’s narrative grammar of fantasy), seeing these as overly r
estrictive (as if one were to describe all tragedy in terms
Jacobean Revenge Tragedy
, as if one were to describe all comedy according to a model based on
Bedroom Farce
), it is because I see works touted under that label navigating a middle ground we might call Twisting, applied to the novum in Clute’s schema but equally applicable to the chimera, or indeed to the erratum or sutura.

This particular mode of fiction would be that in which the incredulity e
ngendered by any flavour of quirk is not just significant and structural but is
escalated
, the tension of alethic modalities developed to a crisis-point comparable with those we find in tragedy or comedy. It would be the narrative of incredulity in the same way that tragedy is the narrative of pity and terror, comedy the narrative of humour. It would underlie Clute’s grammars of horror and fantasy as, in large part, the dynamics that makes them
not
tragedy and comedy.

It is not difficult to discern this form of narrative in works we class as fant
asy, to point to the spectaculism and sensationalism of contemporary
Epic Fantasy
as evidence for a narrative of incredulity. But with the term
fantasy
in play, the associations of that term lead us to a selection bias, an over-specification of the quirk as chimeric, bind the incredulity to metaphysicality when we might as easily be dealing with hypothetical or counterfactual conceits. This is all the more probable given the clear lineage of this mode of strange fiction, the general focus on chimeric conceits all the way back through Tolkien and Lewis, MacDonald and Morris, through the Gothic novel to the texts of chivalric romance and fairy tales (trunk texts or taproot texts). And that lineage is skewed to the marvellous.

Formally speaking, the base narrative mode should be considered a structu
ral approach to the alethic quirk in general rather than to any one flavour of quirk. Scatological humour is not the essence of all comic narrative. Metaphysical impossibility is not the essence of all strange narratives. The incredibility I’m interested in here
might
be the chimera of a magic sword but it might as easily be the exotica of men with their faces in their bellies, the cryptic arcanum of a lost city of legend, the novum of a chess-playing automaton. And it might not be so simply marvellous, might not follow that path off to one side.

If we trim away the gold fruit and red leaves and blue flowers of all these different modern flavours of strangeness, trace the twigs that bear them back past their branch-points, there is a heritage for all these fictions in a form that goes back far beyond the Romantic period, one that places it on a direct par with tragedy and comedy, with a co
ntemporaneous origin. Peake might well be a better analogue of Miller and Orton here, in a middle path for this strange fiction which would border chivalric romances but side more with Cervantes, and carry on back through Shakespeare (
The Tempest
) to Apuleius (
The Golden Ass
) as analogue of Aeschylus and Aristophanes. The picaresque of pre-Enlightenment Europe is as much a part of the discourse of this mode as the chivalric romance and the fairy tale, and in its Classical analogue of the Milesian tale we find, I would argue, an ideal figure of strange fiction in its own right, a fiction founded on the exploitation of the quirk.

Given that the term
fantasy
is highly arguable when we cast the net so wide, will inevitably slide sideways to stand as flipside of horror, given that I’m really talking of a mode which takes those two grammars as extremes as it tends more wholly toward the marvellous or the monstrous, I’m going to surrender the label of fantasy as I surrender the label of science fiction. Apply it as you will. To leave the whole sorry mess of turf wars behind us, as a name for this central and fundamental mode of strange fiction, I will appropriate a term with roots in the same Classical culture as tragedy and comedy, one that’s not too obscure—that’s quite familiar in the fields of poetry and music, in fact—but largely out-of-use now as regards narrative. As the forgotten sibling of comedy and tragedy then, I’m going to talk of
rhapsody
.

When I say “missing the point” what I mean is that (so it seems to me) Benford’s real concern is that scientific rationalism—or simply rationa
lism, full stop—is under constant attack from base superstition and base prejudice…When Benford disses the rise of fantasy, it seems to me his real concern is the loss of science fiction’s core message: that it can introduce the reader—particularly the young reader—to one of the core values of rationality: questioning the accepted order of things.

Gary Gibson

That quote from Anders comes from a few years back, from another cycle of the Great Debate. Picture a blogosphere of heads hitting desks as Gregory Benford testifies, brother, against a rising tide of unreason in the shape of
Fantasy
. Fantasy being Harry Potter, rotting the rational faculties. Anders, like Gary Gibson, stepped in to defend Benford, to cut through the turf war rhetoric, highlight a crucial point—the import of reason as antidote to prejudice. Anders presents it as impartiality towards alterity, Gibson as dubiety towards normativity, but both speak to the core of the critical nous: that it abjures the feedback loop of faith, purges the valorisation of credulity, the belief that questioning belief is wrong.

The rapture of unreason sustains the rapture of unreason. This is what makes it unre
ason, the inverse and inhibition of the discursive, the self-correcting.

Those core values Gibson refers to are dear to me then—analytic intellect against the onslaught of folly. When push comes to shove, that teenage Spock still stalks my little noggin, raising an eyebrow at the rapture of unreason whenever it appears—at the fervour for the End of the Enlightenment you hear, for example, in the crazytalk of those who believe Obama is a Kenyan Muslim. For all that I’ve argued in this book against tribalist Rationalism, I come to the strange fiction genres as one who identified first and foremost as a reader of SF. As a child, I loved Michael de Larrabeiti, Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, but that’s like saying I watched
The Box of Delights
on the BBC, hardly a true fandom. No Frodo or Fafhrd for me, no Conan or Elric, only John Carter got by my no-swords policy at one point. (He was nekkid.) Instead, Asimov led to Bradbury, Clarke, Dick, Ellison, Farmer, Gibson, Heinlein and so on.

Did it teach me acceptance of alterity, that SF? A little, maybes. From the Mule of the Foundation series to the Martians of Bradbury’s “Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed,” there’s much that might resonate with a kid queered by desire, finding solace in the local library, turning from Sarek on the screen to Simak and Sladek on the page. I remember how Heinlein unlocked the closet door for me with his sexual libertarianism, how Delany kicked that door wide open. It makes sense. The fiction of the strange is, by definition, the fi
ction of the alterior; surely it must then, by definition, render the alterior familiar.

And yet…every boy’s own adventure needs its savage enemies. We’d do well not to forget that what we’re dealing with here is category fiction born of the pulps, barefoot summer games of heroes and villains. For all we might point at what it is now, or at the deeper, wider heritage of strange fictions outwith the commercial field, from Gilgamesh on, talking of science fictions and fantasies unbound by the imperatives of juvenilia, our taproots are in the Street & Smith that published
Nick Carter Weekly
and
Buffalo Bill Adventures
alongside
Astounding
. It’s out of that soil this cultivar of a strange blue flower has sprung.

There’s an aesthetic inherited from that pulp, one that idealises individua
lism as will-to-power, appeals to emotion over reason, discards the restraint of realism to glory in the wonder of the incredible made manifest, the sublime. It’s an aesthetic which looks to the past for imagos of virtue in the cowboy or the knight, even where it renders them as spacemen. It’s the aesthetic which gives us fascism wherever its self-infatuation extends to the culture at large, the folk as hero, wherever it demonises or fetishises alterior cultures—as it so often does. It’s the aesthetic of Romanticism, and if we’ve one thing to learn from the twentieth century it’s how badly that aesthetic can go wrong.

So, to use Anders’s examples, the Klingons and the Green Men of Mars are savages of Romance, their warlike characters determined by ethnicity much as we find in Tolkien’s orcs, in all those races of
Fantasy
whose “swarthy” skin is evermade a signifier of inhumanity, alterity as wrongness. The same sources offer races we are far less a-okay with: the Ferengi of Star Trek; the Black Men of Burroughs’s Barsoom. Essentialised grotesques, their greed or violence (or moral degeneracy, one might say) suggests we’re more a-okay with biological determinism than anything. Sadly, it seems, the fiction of the strange can just as easily render the alterior foreign, an exotic Other readily made monstrum when the story calls for a sensational foe.

My scepticism kicks in then, I confess, at heroic fantasies of SF freeing children from their shackles of conditioning. Would it were so. The reality of the escapes we’ve found, may still find, from the bugfuck nutjobbery of our immediate environs—whether that bugfuck nutjobbery be Creationism or Clause 28—is that these are holidays as often organised to rapture us in moral bromides as to teach us to challenge them. As space c
adets in brown shirts, we have learned songs of the sublime along with science and survival skills. In wild campfire tales of adventures elsewhen, told at Camp Consolation by counsellors who were themselves taught by such tales, for a fiction of scientific Rationalism, SF can be terribly Romantic.

Stitchings of Songs

rhapsody
:

•
Music.
an instrumental composition irregular in form and suggestive of improvisation.

• an ecstatic expression of feeling or enthusiasm.

• an epic poem, or a part of such a poem, as a book of the
Iliad
, suitable for recitation at one time.

• a similar piece of modern literature.

• an unusually intense or irregular poem or piece of prose.

•
Archaic.
a miscellaneous collection; jumble.

Dictionary.com

So what do I mean when I talk of
The Golden Ass
,
The Tempest
and even
The Lord of the Rings
as rhapsody rather than fantasy? If the exploitation of the absurd or the abject result in comedy or tragedy, and the limitation of that use leads to the private and pathetic narratives of drama and melodrama, what do I mean when I say that the exploitation of the quirk results in rhapsody?

Well, the term is exapted from its origins in the rhapsodes of Classical Greece. Literally,
rhapsody
means “stitchings of songs,” referring to the repertoire of mythic, comedic and otherwise episodic tales that the rhapsode would weave into the frame of the
epos
or epic, the framing structure remaining constant but the selection of songs varying with each performance according to the rhapsode’s judgement of his audience’s tastes. In a superficial sense all three narratives named above share a certain stitchedness, their framing narratives containing tales told and songs sung, performances within performances and shifts in register to match the changing content’s mode. There is myth and mystery in these texts but also comic escapades, episodes of light relief. This is what the fairy-tale and chivalric romances share with picaresque and the Milesian tale. It is the freedom of form they inherit from comedy where the escalation of absurdity is repeatedly released, in contrast to tragedy’s continual building of tension. Comedies are allowed to sprawl; they defy the grip of tragedy’s (moral, social, natural, divine) order.

Where comedy may be as wildly inchoate as a Monty Python movie howe
ver, rhapsody always returns to the framing structure even if, as in the modern rhapsody, that structure is disassembled, integrated into the episodes, buried in the episodes as the framing narrative of
Catch-22
(the story of the horrors of the war, the epos and tragedy in which Yossarian is Achilles and Snowden Patroclus) is buried in the absurdist chapters each devoted to the individual narrative of one of the characters. The irregularity and improvisational quality associated with rhapsody in its contemporary application in music and poetry is not absent in our application of this term to prose narratives, but neither is the quality of intensity, of ecstasy; rhapsody is held together by this intensity, the profundity of affect, the
gravitas
it inherits from tragedy.

What I am suggesting is essentially this rhapsody as a conceptual frame for those taproot/trunk fictions that are neither comedy nor tragedy but share fe
atures of them both in their dynamics of incredulity etc., the disruption of modalities as a driving power in the history of Western literature. Rather than accept the model of fantastic fiction as a product of the Enlightenment’s scientific worldview, an unrealist irrationalist fiction abjected by the newly invented Rationalist realist literature, and rather than ignoring this aesthetic struggle entirely so as to apply the genre labels of fantasy or science fiction willy-nilly to everything from
Gulliver’s Travels
all the way back to
Gilgamesh
, I’m suggesting we turn this model inside-out: imagine comedy and tragedy as the pillars of a gateway, a portal through which the rhapsode entered the city of New Sodom millennia ago; imagine the history of rhapsody as the long road to the heart of the city in the present day, marked out between the absurd and the monstrous, through Milesian tales and Latin novels, through the chivalric romance and the picaresque, through dramas of Calibans and Ariels, through travellers’ tales, through anecdotes and allegories, through narratives cognisant of their own strangeness long before the Enlightenment brought a scientific worldview to bear. We don’t need science to tell us what defies the laws of nature; we have our tears and laughter to tell us that; we have our open jaws and wide eyes.

This is rhapsody as the narrative form that employs the full range of quirks, as the narrative that is, through Chaucer and Cervantes, Defoe and Richar
dson, Fielding and Sterne, the root of the private and pathetic narratives which will eventually eschew those quirks entirely. This is rhapsody as that mode of strange fiction driven by the deep dynamics of incredulity, a mode that has carried on in the ghetto of Genre all through the era of mimetic fiction’s dominance of Literature, the rhapsody that is re-emerging in that domain right now.